The Heaven Trilogy (26 page)

“He’s dead,” Kent answered, “in a grave somewhere.”

“You think?” The man’s eyebrow arched. “You think your son is in a grave somewhere as well, then?”

Kent blinked and stared at the man hard. “My son?” Now he was growing angry. “What do you know of my son?”

“I know that he was struck by a car a month ago. He say anything to you before he died? Something that morning before you left, perhaps?”

“Why?” Kent demanded. Then it hit him. “Are you a cop? Is this part of the investigation of my son’s death?”

“In a matter of speaking, yes. Let’s just say we are reviewing the implications of your son’s death. I understand you were angry when you left him.”

Linda!
They had interviewed the baby-sitter. “I wouldn’t say angry, no. Look, mister. I loved my boy more than you’ll ever know. We had a disagreement, sure. But that’s it.” What was going on here? Kent felt his chest tighten. What was the man insinuating?

“Disagreement? Over what?”

The man’s eyes stared like two green marbles with holes punched in them, dead center. It occurred to Kent that the eyes were not blinking. He blinked and wondered if the man had blinked in that split second while his own eyes flicked shut. But they did not look as if they’d blinked. They just stared, round and wet. Unless wet meant that he had indeed blinked, in which case maybe the man had blinked. If so, he was timing it pretty good.

The agent cleared his throat and repeated himself. “What was your disagreement over, Kent?”

“Why? Actually we really didn’t have a disagreement. We just talked.”

“Just talked, huh? So you felt pretty comfortable leaving him in the doorway like that?”

Kent flashed back. “How I felt is none of your business. I may have felt like throwing up, for all you should care. Maybe I’d just ingested a rotten apple and felt like puking on the street. Does that make me a murderer?”

The man smiled gently. His eyes were still not blinking. “Nobody called you a murderer, Kent. We just want to help you see some things.”

“Do you mind if I see your credentials? What agency are you with, anyway?”

The man casually reached for his pocket. He found a wallet in his breast pocket and pulled it out.

Kent did not know where the man was headed. Didn’t even know what he meant by what he’d said. He
was
aware, however, of the heat snaking up his neck and spreading over his skull. How dare this man sit here and question his motives? He had loved Spencer more than he loved life itself !

“Listen, sir, I don’t know who you are, but I would die for my boy, you hear?” He didn’t intend for it to come out trembly, but it did. Suddenly tears blurred his vision, but he stumbled forward. “I would lay down my life for that boy in a heartbeat, and I don’t appreciate anybody questioning my love! You got that?”

The stranger pulled a card from his wallet and handed it to Kent without moving his eyes. He didn’t seem affected by these emotions. “That’s good, Kent.”

Kent dropped his eyes to the card: “Jeremy Lawson, Seventh Precinct,” it read in a gold foil. He looked up. The agent’s wire glasses rode neatly on his nose above a smug smile.

“I’m just doing my job, you realize. Now, if you’d rather, I can haul you in and make this formal. Or you can answer a few questions here without coming apart at the seams on me.” He shrugged. “Either way.”

“No, here’s just fine. But you just leave my son out of this. It takes a real sicko to even imagine that I had anything to do with his death.” He trembled saying it, and for a moment he considered standing and leaving the cop.

“Fair enough, Kent. And to be straight with you, I believe that you did love your son.” He offered no more but sat there, smiling at Kent, unblinking. And then he did blink, just once. Like camera shutters, snapping a shot.

“Then that’s that,” Kent said. “If you’ve done your homework, you’ll know that I’ve been through enough these last few months as it is. So if you’re finished, I really need to get back to work.”

“Well, now, that’s just it, Kent. Seems to me there just might be more here than meets the eye.”

Kent flushed. “Meaning what?”

“Have you talked to anyone else about this?”

“Talked to anyone else about
what?”

The agent grinned knowingly and licked his forefinger. He turned the page to the book and glanced at its contents. “Just answer the question, Kent. Have you talked to anyone else? A stranger, perhaps.”

Kent felt his hands tremble, and he removed them from the table. “Look. You’re speaking a foreign language here. Do you know what I’m saying? I don’t have the slightest idea what you mean by any of this. You come in here haranguing me about my son—practically accuse me of killing him—and now you want to know if I’ve talked to any strangers lately? What on Earth does this have to do with me?”

The cop may very well have not even heard him by his response. “A vagrant, say. Or a homeless man in an alley? You haven’t talked to anyone like that recently?”

The man pried his eyes from the book and stared at him, that ear-to-ear grin still splitting his jaw. Kent squinted, sincerely wondering if Mr. Cop here hadn’t slipped over the edge. His own fear that this bizarre exchange led anywhere significant melted slightly. What could a vagrant possible have anything to do with . . . ?

Then it hit him, and he stiffened. The cop noticed, because his right eyebrow immediately arched curiously.

“Yes?”

The vagrant in the alley! They had talked to the spineless vagrant!

But that was impossible! That had been his mind playing with images!

“No,” Kent said. “No, I haven’t talked to any vagrant.” Which was true enough. You did not actually talk in your dreams. Then again he
had
seen the vagrant in the alley prior to the dream, hadn’t he? The man’s summary of life whispered through Kent’s mind.
Life suckssssss . . .
But he hadn’t actually talked to that vagrant either.

“Why don’t you ask me if I’ve had wine and cheese with the president’s wife lately? I can answer that for you, as well.”

“I think you did talk to a stranger in an alley, Kent. And I think he may have told you a few things. I want to know what he told you. That’s all.”

“Well, you’re wrong. What? Some fool said he told me a few things, and that makes me a suspect in the crime of the century?” Kent almost choked on those last few words.
Control yourself, man!

“Crime of the century? I didn’t say anything about a crime, my friend.”

“It was a figure of speech. The point is, you are groping for threads that simply do not exist. You are badgering me with questions about events that have nothing at all to do with me. I lost my wife and my son in the last few months. This does not automatically place me at the top of some most-wanted list, am I right? So then, unless you have questions that actually make sense, you should leave.”

The man’s smile left him. He blinked again. For a few seconds the agent held him in a thoughtful stare, as if that last volley had done the trick—shown Pinhead here who he was really up against.

“You are a bright one. I’ll give you that. But we know more than you realize, Kent.”

Kent shook his head. “Not possible. Unless you know more than I do about me, which is rather absurd, isn’t it?”

The man smiled again. He shifted his seat back, preparing to leave. Thank goodness.

He dipped his head politely and offered Kent one last morsel to chew on. “I want you to consider something, Kent. I want you to remember that eventually everything will be found out. You are indeed a brilliant man, but we are not so slow ourselves. Watch your back. Be careful whose advice you take.”

With that, the agent stood and strode away. He put his hands deep into his pockets, rounded a bookcase ten yards away, and vanished.

Kent sat for a long time, calming his heart, trying to make sense of the exchange. The man’s words nagged him like a burrowed tick, digging at his skull. An image of the man, sitting there with his slicked hair and cheesy grin, swallowed his mind.

Ten minutes later he left the bookstore without buying the books he’d come for.

CHAPTER TWENTY

KENT SAT in the big tan leather lounger facing the tube Monday night taking stock of things. The Forty Niners led the Broncos sixteen to ten, and Denver had the ball at the fifty yard line, but Kent barely knew it. The roar of the crowd provided little more than background static for the images roaring through his mind.

He was taking stock of things. Getting right down in the face of the facts and drawing conclusions that would stay with him until he croaked.

At least that’s how his self-analysis session had started out, back when Denver led six to three. Back before he had gotten started early on his nightcap. Actually he had dispensed with the nightcap routine at the first quarter whistle and settled for the bottle instead. No use kidding around. These were serious matters here.

At the top of his list of deliberations was that cop who had interrupted his reading at Barnes and Noble. The pinhead was on the case. Granted, not
the
case, but the man was onto
him,
and he was the case. Kent took a nip of liquor. Tequila gold. It burned going down, and he sucked at his teeth.

Now what exactly did that mean,
on the case?
It meant that Kent would be a fool to go through with any robbery attempt while Detective Pinhead was around. That’s what it meant. Kent took another small taste from the bottle in his hand. A roar blared through the room; someone had scored.

But then, how could anyone know anything about anything other than what had already happened? Not a soul could possibly know about his plans—he’d told no one. He had started the fine-tuning of ROOSTER, but no one else had access to the program. Certainly not some pinhead cop who probably didn’t know computer code from alphabet soup.

“We know more than you think we do, Kent.”

“We do? And who’s we? Well I think you’re wrong, Pinhead. I think you know zero. And if you know ten times that much it’s still a big fat whoppin’ goose egg, isn’t it?”

The simple fact was, unless Pinhead could read his mind or was employing some psychic who could read minds, he knew nothing about the planned robbery. He was bluffing. But why? Why would the cop even suspect enough to merit a bluff ? Regardless of why or how, the notion of continuing, considering this latest development, rang of madness. Like a resounding gong.
Bong, bong, bong! Stupid, stupid, stupid! Get your butt back to Stupid Street, fool.

But he could plan. And he should plan, because who was to say that Pinhead would hang around? For that matter, even with the man on the case, Kent’s plan was foolproof, wasn’t it? What difference would an investigation make? And there
would
be an investigation, regardless. Oh yeah, there would be one heck of an investigation, all right. You don’t just kill someone and expect a round of applause. But that was just it. There would be an investigation, no matter what he did. Pinhead or no pinhead. So it really made no difference whether the cop stayed on the case or not.

An episode of
Forensics
Kent had watched on Saturday replayed through his mind. It featured a case in which some idiot had plotted the perfect murder but had one problem. He’d killed the wrong man. In the end he had attempted the murder again, this time on the right person. He had failed. He was rotting in some prison now.

That was the problem with having the cops already breathing down your neck; they would be more likely to stumble onto some misplaced tidbit that nailed you. To be done right, most crimes had to come out of the blue. Certainly not under the watchful nose of some pinhead who was stalking you.

But this was not most crimes. This was
the
perfect crime. The one all the shows could not showcase because no one knew it had even occurred.

Kent lifted the bottle and noted that it was half empty.

And the cop was not the only one breathing down his neck. Cliff, the mighty snowboarder-turned-programmer, was annoying Kent with his intrusive style of
Let’s check your code, Kent.
What if Boy Wonder actually stumbled onto ROOSTER? It would be the end, of course. The whole plan rested squarely on the shoulders of ROOSTER’s secrecy. If the security program was discovered, the plot would blow up. And if anybody could find it, Cliff could. Not as a result of his brilliance as much as his dogged tenacity. There was a single link buried in AFPS that led to ROOS-TER: an extra “m” in the word “extremmely,” itself buried in a routine not yet active. If the “m” were deleted by some spelling-bee wizard intent on setting things straight, the link automatically shifted to the second “e” in the same word. Only someone with way too much time on their hands could possibly uncover the hook.

Someone like Cliff.

Kent went for a chug on the bottle and closed his eyes to the throat burn. The game was in its second half. He’d missed the big showdown at the end of the first. Didn’t matter.

“Be real,” he mumbled. “Nobody’s gonna find no link. No way this side of Hades.”

And he knew he was right.

An image of Lacy drifted through the fog in his mind. Now,
there
was a solution to this whole mess. He could discuss the fine points of committing a federal felony with Lacy. Cut her in. An anemic little chuckle escaped his lips at the thought. It sounded more like the burp that followed it.

Fact was, even if he wanted a relationship with a woman, it was simply not feasible. Not with mistress ROOSTER in his life. It wasn’t that they wouldn’t both share him. It was that they
couldn’t.
Assuming they wanted to. Which was yet one more problem: He was thinking of ROOSTER as if it were a real person that possessed a will worth considering. ROOSTER was a link, for heaven’s sake! A plan. A program.

Either way, he still could not cohabit with both ROOSTER and any living soul. Period. ROOSTER demanded it. The plan would fall apart.

So then, what on earth did he think he was doing with Lacy?